Ursula Le Guin - The Wave in the Mind

But when you can and do entrain, you are synchronising with the people you’re talking with, physically getting in time and tune with them. No wonder speech is so strong a bond, so powerful in forming community.

I do not know to what extent people watching movies and TV entrain with speakers; since no mutual response is possible, it seems likely that the intense involvement characteristic of conversation would be much weakened.

Seeing is analytical, not integrative. The eye wants to distinguish objects. The eye selects. Seeing is active, outgoing. We look at . We focus on . We make distinctions easily so long as the field is clear. The visual ideal is clarity. That’s why glasses are so satisfactory. Seeing is yang.

Hearing is integrative; it unifies. Being on opposite sides of the head, ears are pretty good at telling where a sound comes from, but though the mind, the attention, can focus hearing, can listen to , the ear essentially hears from: it can’t focus narrowly and can select only with effort. The ear can’t stop hearing; we have no earlids; only sleep can shut off our reception. While we are awake our ears accept what comes. As this is likely to be noise, the auditory ideal is harmony. That’s why hearing aids, which increase noise, are so often unsatisfactory. Hearing is yin.

Light may come from vast distances, but sound, which is only vibrations in air, doesn’t travel far. Starlight carries a thousand lightyears; a human voice can carry a mile or so at most. What we hear is almost always quite local, quite nearby. Hearing is an immediate, intimate sense, not quite as close as touch, smell, taste, proprioception, but much more intimate than sight.

Sound signifies event. A noise means something is happening. Let’s say there’s a mountain out your window. You see the mountain. Your eyes report changes, snowy in winter, brown in summer, but mainly just report that it’s there. It’s scenery. But if you hear that mountain, then you know it’s doing something. I see Mount St. Helens out my study window, about eighty miles north. I did not hear it explode in 1980: the sound wave was so huge that it skipped Portland entirely and touched down in Eugene, a hundred miles to the south. Those who did hear that noise knew that something had happened. That was a word worth hearing. Sound is event.

Speech, the most specifically human sound, and the most significant kind of sound, is never just scenery, it’s always event.

Walter Ong says, “Sound exists only when it is going out of existence.” This is a very complicated simple statement. You could say it also about life. Life exists only as it is going out of existence.

Consider the word existence , printed on a page of a book. There it sits, all of it at once, nine letters, black on white, maybe for years, for centuries, maybe in thousands of copies all over the world.

Now consider the word as you speak it: “existence.” As soon as you say “tence,” “exis” is already gone, and now the whole thing’s gone. You can say it again, but that is a new event.

When you speak a word to a listener, the speaking is an act. And it is a mutual act: the listener’s listening enables the speaker’s speaking. It is a shared event, intersubjective: the listener and speaker entrain with each other. Both the amoebas are equally responsible, equally physically, immediately involved in sharing bits of themselves. The act of speaking happens NOW. And then is irrevocably, unrepeatably OVER.

Because speaking is an auditory event, not a visual one, it uses space and time differently from anything visual, including words read on paper or on a monitor.

“Auditory space has no point of favored focus. It is a sphere without fixed boundaries, space made by the thing itself, not space containing the thing.” (Ong)

Sound, speech, creates its own, immediate, instantaneous space. If we shut our eyes and listen, we are contained within that sphere.

We read printed on a page, “She shouted.” The page is durable, visible space containing the words. It is a thing not an act. But an actor shouts, and the shout is an act. It makes its own, local, momentary space.

The voice creates a sphere around it, which includes all its hearers: an intimate sphere or area, limited in both space and time.

Creation is an act. Action takes energy.

Sound is dynamic. Speech is dynamic—it is action.

To act is to take power, to have power, to be powerful.

Mutual communication between speakers and listeners is a powerful act. The power of each speaker is amplified, augmented, by the entrainment of the listeners. The strength of a community is amplified, augmented by its mutual entrainment in speech.

This is why utterance is magic. Words do have power. Names have power. Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.

Oral performance is a particular kind of human speech. It is to an oral culture what reading is to a literate culture.

Reading is not superior to orality, and orality is not superior to reading. The two behaviors are different and have extremely different social effects. Silent reading is an implacably private activity, which while it is occurring separates the reader bodily and psychically from the people nearby. Oral performance is a powerful bonding force, which while it is occurring bonds people physically and psychically.

In our literate culture oral performance is seen as secondary, marginal. Only readings by poets of their own works and theatrical performance by actors may be perceived as having literary power comparable to written work read in silence. But oral performance in an oral culture is recognised as a powerful act, and for that reason it is always formal.

The formality is on both sides. The orator or storyteller tries to meet and fulfill certain definite expectations in the audience, gives formal cues to the audience, and may respond to formal cues from the audience. The audience will show attentiveness by certain expected behaviors: by keeping a posture of attention; in some cases, by total silence; more often, by formulaic responses—Yes, Lord! Hallelujah!—or formulaic words or affirmations: ah—hai—hah—enh…. In poetry readings, little quiet gasps. In comic performances, laughter.

Oral performance uses time and space in a particular way of its own. It creates its own, temporary, physical, actual spacetime, a sphere containing a speaking voice and listening ears, a sphere of entrained vibration, a community of body and mind.

This might be the sphere that holds a woman telling her children the tale of the Three Bears—a small, quiet, deeply intimate event.

It might be the smoky sphere that holds a stand-up comedian extemporising to an audience in a bar—a seemingly informal but, if successful, intensely and genuinely interactive event.

It could be the sphere holding a revivalist preacher speaking his hellfire sermon to a tent revival—a big, noisy, yet highly formalised, powerfully rhythmic event.

It could be the sphere that held Martin Luther King Jr. and the people who heard him say “I have a dream.”

That formal oratorical event can be echoed, can be shadowed, can be recollected, by films and recordings. Images of it can be reproduced. But it cannot. An event does not happen twice. We do not step twice into the same river.

Oral performance is irreproducible.

It takes place in a time and place set apart: cyclic time, ritual time, or sacred time. Cyclical time is heartbeat, body-cycle time; lunar, seasonal, annual time: recurrent time, musical time, dancing time, rhythmic time. An event does not happen twice, yet regular recurrence is the essence of cyclic time. This year’s spring is not last year’s spring, yet spring returns always the same. A rite is performed anew, every year, at the same time, in the same way. A story is told again and again, and yet each new telling is a new event.